Dear Friends,
Apologies in advance for making this one such a long one. It’s been over 6 weeks since I last wrote so I had a backlog of topics I had to write about - including an idea for a book I want to write, notes from our family trip to London, and the usual roundup of short updates.
Oh, and new this week, all of my substack posts (SomeOfTheThings.substack.com) will be auto-published to my paragraph publication (https://paragraph.com/@adrienne), so you might be reading this on substack or paragraph.
Enjoy.
If you were to write a book, what would it be about?
The book I want to write is The Joy of Coding.
I don’t think most people think of joy when they picture computer code. Ask a room full of engineers and you’re just as likely to hear about frustration, toil, tedium, bugs, and middle of the night deployments as you are about delight.
But when I look back on the 25 years since I learned to code, the one word that keeps coming to mind is joy.
On my podcast, GM Farcaster, we end interviews with a lightning round of rapid-fire questions. One of my favorites is: If you were to write a book, what would it be about?
Someone recently flipped the question back on me and I didn’t have an answer. But it must have planted a seed because a few weeks ago, in the middle of a yoga class, a thought popped into my head out of nowhere and it was loud and incessant:
I should write a book about the joy of coding.
First Spark
My first memory of coding was a course I took in college. It was a required computer science class for my Environmental Systems Engineering major. According to my transcript, it was called CMPSC 203: Bus Pgm Aplcn. I believe we spent the entire semester learning Turbo Pascal. Using a DOS-based terminal, we set variables, used conditionals, and wrote loops to print sequential numbers 1 to 10 on a screen. Very, very basic stuff. I am certain I didn’t feel “joy” during this class, yet why is it that almost 30 years later I still remember the feeling of excitement of watching my code compile and seeing the expected results print out on a screen.
Continuing to Code
My first job out of college was at PwC as a technical consultant. I went through a training program where we learned to build client-server applications using Java and Oracle, and web programs using PHP. It didn’t feel like work. It felt like playing a video game or solving a puzzle.
Then came Cityfeet.com, where I picked up web development—HTML, CSS, VB6, ASP, SQL Server. We used tables for page layouts and CSS red borders for debugging. We deployed changes over FTP. Everything was manual - writing code, testing changes, deploying to live, rolling back when something didn’t work as expected. I remember pressing F5 to refresh the live website, holding my breath each time. Did I break it? Did it work? A sigh of relief when it worked out and I didn’t have to spend the evening trying to fix a mess.
Next was Aon, where I joined a small, talented team to build one of the first digital benefits enrollment systems. I worked on the data exchange platform, my first time working with large batch processing and systems and data integrations. I don’t remember those years as necessarily joyful either, but I know I was never bored at work. Year after year brought new and challenging problems to solve. I can still close my eyes and picture the 300 line SQL statement we used for a bulk export and the hours upon hours I spent profiling and tuning it to shave off seconds of runtime.
Looking back at my early professional years spent coding, I’ve come to realize there’s something deeply satisfying about coding that maybe my friends in other careers didn’t experience.
I was developing hard, practical skills, and using them to build something tangible. At the end of the day (or week, or quarter, or year), I could point to something tangible in the world and say, “I contributed to that”. I discovered the kind of personal fulfillment that comes from creating something that didn’t exist before.
Joy Fades
As I moved into leadership and management roles, I stepped away from hands-on coding. Work became… work. Meetings. Spreadsheets. Power points. More meetings.
As my salary increased, I experienced less joy at work.
And Joy Returns
Then came DevOps.
I’ve written before about how adopting DevOps practices at work brought joy back into my career. Even though I wasn’t writing the code myself, shifting our planning from annual to quarterly cycles and increasing our deployment frequency from quarterly to weekly had an incredible effect. Work became fun again.
Once I saw firsthand how DevOps not only led to better quality software, but made the team happier too, there was no turning back.
For the first time, I started to pursue happiness at work intentionally.
Work doesn’t have to suck.
A few years later, that pursuit led me somewhere unexpected: crypto. And then Farcaster. Crypto is an open invitation for builders. It’s open source. It’s permissionless. It’s global.
And for the first time in 15 years, I started coding again.
I worked my way through a 30-hour, self-paced full stack crypto dev course. I built an AI bot. I created a Farcaster Mini App so people could watch GM Farcaster livestreams without leaving the app. I vibe-coded a few websites. I joined a hackathon.
Am I loving it? Am I having fun?
Not exactly. It’s been brutal. Frustrating. A total slog.
I’ve spent entire days stuck, making zero progress. Picking up coding after a 15-year break is hard, especially when the landscape has changed so much. The last time I was hands-on, there was no GitHub, no open source at scale, no mobile apps, no modern JavaScript frameworks, no APIs as we know them, no cloud. Sure, I had plenty of familiarity with building modern software because I led teams building with all these tools, but I wasn’t the one typing the code so I’ve found it quite difficult to pick back up.
And yet… through all the struggle and frustration of learning how to code again, something surprising has emerged.
A feeling of joy.
Where does that joy come from?
There’s No Joy Without Slog
Maybe the Zen master was right: the obstacles are the way.
Maybe the slog isn’t a barrier to joy, it’s the path to it.
Let me explain with a story. I recently participated in a Farcaster hackathon with two people I know from the community: Tiago and Graham. On the day of the event, we had to decide what we wanted to build together.
A few hours before Builder Day kicked off, we dropped a bunch of ideas into a shared Google Doc. No judgments, just brainstorming. When it came time to choose, none of us felt strongly about any one idea, so we set a timer: ten minutes to decide.
To make the call, we quickly aligned on what mattered most to us:
We wanted to ship something end-to-end—a real working MVP.
We each wanted to learn something new.
We weren’t trying to win; that wasn’t the goal.
We wanted to build something that would capture attention.
And we wanted to have fun.
Once we had those criteria, the answer was obvious: Coinaroid. It was the only idea that checked every box.
One idea we passed on was a Farcaster birthday horoscope mini app. Users would get a daily fortune based on their FID and could mint and share the result. Graham and I liked it—we both wanted to learn how to incorporate onchain transactions, and we’d seen how similar mini apps quickly captured attention. But Tiago, the most experienced developer on our team, shot it down. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it wasn’t novel. It was something he could build in an hour or two by forking one of JC4P’s open source repos (JC4P is one of Farcaster’s most prolific mini app developers). For Tiago, there’d be no challenge. No growth. No joy.
We chose the harder path. A project that would push all three of us.
We coded nonstop until they kicked us out of the building at 9 PM, then moved to a bar and kept going until midnight. We shipped at 12:15 AM.
It was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.
Joy is in the Process, Not the Outcome
Growing up, my mom had a copy of The Joy of Cooking in our kitchen. Threadbare cover. Four inches thick. I never read it, but I remember the title. And I think it left an impression.
It’s not called The Joy of Food. It’s The Joy of Cooking. The joy is in the process, not the result.
That’s how I feel about code. It’s not The Joy of Software. It’s The Joy of Coding.
The Book I’m Going to Write
I’m going to write a book about Joy and Coding.
I’ll interview friends, teammates, and fellow builders who share this feeling. I know why coding brings me joy, but I want to document and understand how others describe their joy. Where it comes from. What it takes to access it. What makes it worth the pain.
Maybe it’ll inspire someone else to try coding. Or rediscover it. Or chase joy in their own way.
Or maybe not. But it’ll be written.
Check in with me in five years.
(And if you are reading this and have a personal story to share about joy and coding, please get in touch!)
Spring Break in London
I spent a week last month visiting and sightseeing with my family in London. I enjoy traveling to new places and while I’ve been to London before, I enjoyed seeing it through a different lens on this trip. Two of my favorite quotes about travel are:
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber
“The most dangerous world views are the worldview of those who have never viewed the world.” - Alexander Humboldt
We did a ton! London Eye, eBikes in Hyde Park, Science Museum, Churchill War Rooms, Scone Making, Chelsea match, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, High Tea at The Savoy, Theater (Book of Mormon), Bath, Stonehenge, Windsor Castle, Macbeth at The Globe Theater, Borough Market, Camden, Cambridge.
Some of my notes:
At the London Science Museum I learned the first pregnancy tests were TOADS! “…urine from the woman being tested was injected into animals such as this Xenopus toad. The toad reacted to hormones in the urine of pregnant women by laying eggs. Specialist hospital and university laboratories held thousands of toads for these tests, which were only available to women who needed to know if they were pregnant for medical reasons.”
One of my favorite things to do when traveling with teenagers is find a cooking class. We found a scone baking class. Great way to learn about local culture while doing a hands-on activity. British scones are very different than the triangle shaped pastry we call scones in America. We had ours served with clotted cream and jam. Delicious.
Traveling with teens means eating all the TikTok famous things like chocolate covered strawberries at the Borough Market, honey truffle and parmesan pork ciabatta from the Black Pig, cucumber salad, garlic green beans and soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung, creme brulee donuts, dubai chocolate, k-dogs, and lavender haze lemonade. Note to self: if I ever open a restaurant, figure out how to go viral on TikTok.
Visting Cambridge, home to a university that’s over 800 years old, was a really nice day. Punting down the river was peaceful and meditative. We ate at a pub that dates back to the 14 century. For all my critique of modern day universities, I do think their ideals are noble and worth defending: education, knowledge, philosophy and the pursuit of truth.
Overall, London felt similar to NYC, but calmer and cleaner. I guess that’s why people call it called London Town and not London City?
Some of the (other) things
FarCon Recap: The 3rd Farcaster user conference was held in Brooklyn earlier this month. I attended and published a recap.
FarHack Winner: As mentioned above, I participated in FarCon Builders day this year. Joined a team and we built Coinaroid in just over 12 hours of hacking. It’s a mini app that lets you coin your content (image, title, caption) using the Zora SDK, and share to Farcaster, all without leaving Farcaster. We were happy to be selected as winners of the Base $2500 bounty, and maybe even a prouder moment was getting a shoutout from Fred Wilson of USV Ventures during his talk at FarCon.
Finally added a much anticipated, third workflow route for GMFC101, where it can look up the full transcript of a specific show and use that as additional context to answer questions.
29 Seconds of Farcaster: Launched a new newsletter called 29 Seconds of Farcaster, which features a quick rundown of what happened on Farcaster over the weekend, curated by the one and only bradq, and delivered every Monday.
What I’ve watched: Four Seasons (with Tina Fey and Steve Carell), Conclave (about choosing the pope), and Draft Day (an older sports movie that was perfect for watching with my 14 year old son).
Enjoyed listening to this timely podcast, as I’ve had a few conversations with people lately about the intersection of DevOps/Observability and Agents. Honeycomb cofounder and CTO Charity Majors sat down with
to talk about building software in the age of AI. Great discussion about hiring junior engineers as an investment, shifting the center of gravity away from code generation and towards production, and seeing software as socio-technical systems.
The other night at dinner, with my oldest recently home from her freshman year at college, we had a conversation that I know is going to stick with me. Out of nowhere, she said, “You know what you guys did well?”, and my ears perked up. How often do teenagers offer unsolicited praise? “You let us do things on our own,” she said. “My friends’ parents do so much for them. You make us do everything on our own.” She was referring to daily tasks in the life of a college freshman - booking flights, choosing classes, decorating her dorm, packing up at the end of the year, etc. I once wrote about wanting my kids to grow up with independence and self-awareness, not high achievement or perfect grades. I almost cried when I heard her say this because it’s exactly what I want for her, to grow into a young adult, independent, capable and confident.
A Note to My Readers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️
